Oops, You Just Hired the Wrong Hitman

Say you want someone, you know, eliminated—a lover, a business partner, a mother-in-law. There are guys out there who will do that. For a price. Then there's another kind of guy. A guy who looks and acts just like a regular hit man. Prison tats, do-rag. But instead of doing the job, he turns sides and then you realize that you were his target all along

Lucero told the hit man to meet him behind the Loaf ’N Jug, where they could have some privacy. But the hit man parks out front. Broad daylight. Fuck. Lucero’s never done this sort of thing before, needs to be discreet. He’s dressed all in black, midtwenties, a bulge in his pocket. He goes thundering toward the hit man’s truck, flings open the door, and rolls inside, thinks holy flying fuck when he sees, okay, this is what the hit man looks like: huge, do-rag, ZZ Top beard hanging down, knuckle rings, the whole shitbag shebang. The real deal. This is the real-fucking-deal.

What’s going on? the hit man says, turning to him, calm as dirt.

Lucero is electric. Up till now it’s all been a few scratchy phone calls. A friend of a friend who knew a guy. Someone who could help. Seeing him now, in the flesh, Lucero feels compelled to tell the hit man everything, every tiny, wretched detail that led him to call upon the services of a professional. Everything was going good for me, he says. Fucking had a job, worked out there at Unit Three; I had a good car.

Unit Three? the hit man asks.

Lucero yammers uncontrollably. That’s always been a problem. Tangents darting like squirrels in his head. Good cash, man, fucking had a good car, just everything was going good. I was expecting a kid, and my girlfriend went behind my back and said, Hey, I’m going to name the kid after my mom and dad, you know, which, it ain’t right—I didn’t like that. I thought it was unfair. I thought we should sit down and talk about it. But that didn’t happen.

That’s fucked-up, the hit man says.

The fucked-up part about it is, like, love is blinding, you know?

Uh-huh, says the hit man.

People stroll in and out of the Loaf ’N Jug, a lady with Pringles, a guy slapping a fresh pack of Marlboros, a teenager sipping something blue. It’s a clear May day in Colorado, and the hit man is a good listener.

She broke up with me in August while she was at home and I was at work, Lucero continues. She took all my money, she fucking took my car, man. She took my car! Well, it was in her name.

Uh-huh—

Lucero’s leg is bouncing, vibrating nerves and anger and age-old uncertainty, nothing adding up. People treating him like shit. People always lying and tricking him. He has a switchblade in his belt. The .45 in his pants is loaded and cocked.

She had the nerve to smile at me, all right? says Lucero. She had the nerve to smile at me! And she says, I can’t be with somebody who doesn’t even understand his own origins.

Like anyone else, given the choice, a hit man would prefer to understand any given backstory. But a hit man is going to put only so much work into that.

Tell me what you want done, the hit man says. Do you want something done?

Oh, I want something done. I want that bitch’s face cut.

Just saying it out loud, it’s the first step toward healing. Lucero knows that for sure now, and he says it repeatedly—cut her face up—and each time he feels lighter, a load off his heart, his pounding, suffering heart. The love of his life, she walked away laughing.

The hit man has ice blue eyes that don’t wander, don’t shift or pierce with disdain. So you don’t want her dead, you want her scarred up?

Yeah, Lucero says. For all the money she took from me. All the money I gave—I gave her the world. And I got this back? So, here, I’ll put a smile on your face…that fucking smile, why I can’t sleep; I just want her face completely fucking disfigured. Not just cuts. I’m talking about all the way through.

I’d use a fillet knife, the hit man says, like a fish.

Oh yeah, Lucero says. I want her face cut to her skull—I want her life a completely living fucking hell. Which she did to me. I want it to be vice-versed.

So from the corner of her mouth to up close near her ears, the hit man says. Once you get back in here, there’s shit that stops you. You can only get so far back. This shit, right here? That’s going to stop you. You want both sides done?

How he came up with fillet knife, the hit man, who is not really a hit man, has no idea. You get into character. In the morning, when he puts on the do-rag, the jewelry, the Pabst Blue Ribbon sleeveless tank exposing heavy-metal tats, he’ll coach himself: You are a common standard-white-trash shithead. He’ll study his face. Lower his chin, crack a dangerous smile. And with girls in the meth world, you’re a catch….

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives employs an army of guys like him whom nobody’s ever heard of and nobody is supposed to know about. On the street he goes by Thrash or Hammer or any name that might suggest a ruthless killer, but for this story we will call him Special Agent Charles Hunt. People hire him to kill or maim or blow stuff up, and he goes along with it until…he doesn’t. The bust happens. The intended victim is saved. The wacko who ordered the hit gets put away.

__

This happens with alarming frequency all over the country among populations you might and might not expect. There are of course lunatics who come up with painfully stupid ideas: A convicted rapist in Florida wants the judge who sentenced him killed, and so he orders a hit, from prison. But there are also people with higher standing in the community: An Air Force sergeant wants help eliminating someone who heard him threaten his squadron leaders. An entrepreneur in Kentucky, facing a financial setback, thinks about having the hit man blow up his movie theater with his business partner in it, but decides instead to just have him killed at home (tonight). Love often plays a predominant role in the stories of people who hire hit men. The jilted and the scorned. The hopeless and the desperate: A woman in New Jersey wants her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend shot in the head (Gone, gone to the moon) and the boyfriend shot in the foot. She’s already picked out her black funeral outfit. Women. Men. Old. Young. This race or that. A woman in Colorado Springs is so sick of her friend running her mouth and possibly exposing her awesome check-washing service that she wants the woman shot and driven to the mountains to rot. The customer’s name is Vanessa Carr, and she is, she says, having a bad day. Like the others, she has no idea she is being recorded when she orders the hit.

CARR: I got an eviction notice today. So now I have to fork out money for that, find a new place, and now my dog is pregnant. And I’m not keeping any of those puppies. I’m gonna sell all the puppies.

HIT MAN: Yeah, make some money off of that shit.

CARR: I can make at least nine grand.

HIT MAN: Maybe that happened for a reason.

CARR: That’s what I’m saying.

HIT MAN: Nine grand would be just about right.

The hit man will sit listening to this stuff, agreeing to the terms, cash, guns, drugs, puppies, whatever. Sometimes people want proof before they’ll pay. For example, photos, which can be a pain. The hit man will have to stage the crime scene, fake blood, fake gunshot wound—a whole Hollywood production. The hard part is teaching the intended victim how to play dead.

When the cops swoop in for the takedown, Hunt will get busted along with the bad guy so as not to blow his cover, and when the coast is clear, he’ll reemerge on the streets, ready to resume his dirtbag work. Other federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies have undercover units, but hit-man work is an ATF specialty.

It is impossible to know how many of the 6,000 unsolved murders that occur in the U.S. each year are the result of real hits by real hit men.

Some cases bother Hunt more than others. A few years back, an FBI agent contacts him about a woman in the Southwest who is offering $5,000 to murder her former son-in-law. Hunt gets the number and calls: I hear you need some help. She’s a teacher. She wants to stop the man who she says is molesting her grandchild. Her former son-in-law. He’s going for custody. She has to stop him. Can the hit man make it look like an accident? A gas leak? A car wreck? You have to do something. The hit man agrees, as he always agrees: This is my line of work. The teacher sends a package in the mail. Pictures with yellow Post-it notes indicating who is who. [Granddaughter] and her mom (protect). The address. Maps. Explicit instructions, rewrite info…burn this, where the monster will be, when, date of birth, and two $50 bills for a down payment.

Law-enforcement officers pick her up the next day. The charge is federal murder for hire.

Outside the Loaf ’N Jug, one awkward matter Lucero needs to address is the fact that he doesn’t have any money for the hit. I can’t even get a job because of what she did, he tells the hit man, which is another whole story probably, so the hit man doesn’t ask. They’ve been at this nearly an hour.

I’ve got unemployment coming, says Lucero. I’m looking at $250 every two weeks. I could throw three-quarters of it your way.

Lucero tells the hit man about a friend who makes remote-control pipe bombs. Would the hit man like some of those? Why, yes, the hit man would love to know about the friends and all the other people Lucero might know involved in the sale and distribution of black-market explosives.

For lent last year, the hit man, who is not really a hit man, gave up beer. In his cubicle at the ATF field office, he has photos and inspirational sayings tacked up. PEOPLE SLEEP PEACEFULLY IN THEIR BEDS AT NIGHT BECAUSE ROUGH MEN STAND READY TO DO VIOLENCE ON THEIR BEHALF. A crucifix, skulls, a pirate sword, an image of Yosemite Sam. WHOEVER FIGHTS MONSTERS SHOULD SEE TO IT THAT IN THE PROCESS HE DOES NOT BECOME A MONSTER.

He asks me not to tape-record his voice, because it’s one of the few identifying factors he can’t really change, and not to reveal too many details about his tattoos, his surveillance car, or the fake biography that he uses. But other than that… Underneath the dirtbag gear, he has a boyish appearance; deep, alert eyes and the constant grimace of a rascal holding back a joke: I can’t believe how fucking stupid people are. He allows that he’s a better actor than he ever knew he would be but is quick to recognize that desperate people believe what they need to believe. He thinks a lot about despair, the outer edge, what can put a person there.

__

He started as a regular cop in Mesa, Arizona, back in the ’90s, working narcotics. He got to know some ATF guys doing undercover and joined up in 2000. In 2004 he became part of a team infiltrating the Aryan Brotherhood, living in a pink house on a lake, wired, buying drugs and guns and collecting evidence. The gang, Order of Blood MC, ran with the Hells Angels. Nine months he lived with them. He was supposed to get a swastika tattoo on his neck, but he got out of that one. Waking up, needing a mirror. You are a cop. They are not. He would have to look in his eyes and say it. Remind himself. The takedown was massive. Jails lined up to accommodate the pagan roundup.

Afterward it was like coming home from combat duty. You don’t just step out of something like that and return to your suburban life. He had trouble answering to his own name, couldn’t remember his own signature. His wife left him. He had to rebuild. He was in his midthirties.

Do you want to drive around? he asks me. You want me to show you the Safeway? He’s awkward talking about his work, a topic he’s been so well trained to avoid. Most of his friends are church friends, and they talk about church. He teaches Sunday school; the beard halfway down his chest throws some of the parishioners. Hey, if I put on a robe I’d look like a Franciscan friar, he’ll say. To the outside world he’s a secret, and to the inside world he’s a different secret, and in each of these worlds he has secret colleagues—dirtbags and saints. Most of the ATF’s 2,500 agents have done some undercover work, but the guys who do murder-for-hire cases (the ATF won’t say how many) are a special breed. They know one another, swap tips. There’s George in Nashville who’s been at it for twenty-five years, is known as an elder. There’s Charlie in Kansas City, and Darryl in Los Angeles, and Pierce in Austin, the one the girls go wild for; one time a woman hired him to kill her boyfriend, and then she asked him out.

People interested in murder are a naive and trusting lot.

The best surveillance car, Hunt tells me, is an American four-door sedan. (Another fake hit man prefers a minivan with soccer magnets.) We’re headed toward Pueblo, south of Colorado Springs, where he spent some time a few years ago. He’s part of the ATF’s vast Denver field division, which covers all of Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming, but he could show up anywhere. In the trunk he has clothes corresponding to different identities, and guns and leg irons and a bulletproof vest. When he works a place like Pueblo, he starts by networking. Stops at a shooter house to buy a dark and light (a mix of brown and white heroin), sees if anyone has any grenades or C-4 or other explosives to sell. He spends a lot of time in parking lots, Arby’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, back by the Dumpsters, where the action is.

He tells me to check out the Urban Dictionary definition of Pueblo if I want to know what we’re getting into. An infected anal hair located in Kebo’s ass, reads one. The most bars per capita, highest teen-pregnancy rate, drug-dealers, beaners, and straight-up shitty rating in the western United States, reads a more sober version. And yet some significant portion of the outside world knows Pueblo as home to the famous Colorado State Fair and the National Little Britches rodeo finals.

See, it’s all intermingled, Hunt tells me, pointing out a family horseback-riding place sitting adjacent to a famous tweaker house. Ten pounds of black tar, he says, pointing to an apartment complex; then, Good Mexican rocket fuel, $1,500 an ounce, as we pass another. He shows me graffiti tags on houses you can read, tag by tag, gang by gang. The thing he gets from buying drugs and guns and networking the way he does is dirtbag cred. He will let it be known that he’ll do anything for the right price, including kill. That’s how it worked in his first murder-for-hire case. A friend of a friend. Pretty soon this guy Christopher Shelton is calling him. I need something done. This was 2003. They met in a Safeway parking lot. There it is, right there, Hunt says, driving by like you would past your old school.

I hear you, he said to Shelton, who explained he was in a jam. A woman had witnessed him beat the fuck out of a nigger and now was running her mouth, so he needed her dead.

This is my line of work, the hit man said to Shelton, who agreed to pay $2,000 for the hit, plus the throwaway gun to use in the murder and a bonus package that included Shelton killing someone for the hit man if he ever needed it someday, which the hit man awkwardly said he didn’t, figuring that’s what a hit man would say, on account of…pride?

HIT MAN: You gonna want pictures and shit to verify this?

SHELTON: I’d fucking love to have the bitch’s eyeball.

HIT MAN: You want her eyeball?

SHELTON: I would love that.

HIT MAN: You just want to keep it or what? Make a necklace out of it?

Shelton also requested a fingertip. A fingertip? Much of the work of a fake hit man is acquiring evidence that will later be used in court. Will a jury be convinced that this guy really ordered a murder? Any signs of entrapment or any other trickery? Hunt will always give the bad guy an out, will constantly ask if he’s sure, so there can be no doubt in a jury’s mind. You say an eyeball. And a fingertip. Is that correct? Meanwhile, others on the team handle the considerably delicate task of ringing some doorbell, scraping shoes on some welcome mat, stepping inside, and saying, I regret to inform you. It’s your wife. Or it’s your business partner. Or it’s your boyfriend. Somebody wants you dead.

Hunt thinks of himself as a man committed to doing good, serving others, a person of valor who must constantly struggle to maintain virtue. His favorite saint is Padre Pio, the Capuchin Catholic priest from Italy who became famous for bearing the stigmata: bleeding wounds corresponding to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus.

More than once he has considered getting a tattoo to honor the mystical, to give witness to his faith, but then he can’t. A hit man with a God tattoo would definitely not sell.

He’s remarried, has four kids, a house in the suburbs with a nice lawn and a gas grill he’s mastered and fly-fishing gear in the garage. His wife knows his work, sort of. And his kids know his work, sort of. He has as many as four phones with him at all times. He was at a movie with his kids the day he had to go call the woman who ordered the hit on her former son-in-law who she believed was molesting her grandchild.

I have to go talk to a bad guy, he said to his kids, and stepped outside. He tries to normalize it. His son is heading off to college. He wonders if he’ll come home to visit; you know boys tend to stop doing that after about one semester. If he does come home to visit, Hunt worries about his son driving highways at night alone.

You want it done for sure? the hit man asks Lucero. You’ve got no worries about it? He’s imagining this tape playing in court.

No worries, says Lucero.

I’m going to ask you several times. I want to make sure you know you’ve got to live with this for the rest of your life.

I’m going to live with it.

You’ve got to make sure. You’re a young guy. If you maim somebody or kill somebody, you can’t ever take that back.

Oh, I’m not, Lucero replies.

I’m telling you as an older guy who’s done this a couple times. You gotta live with it. Me? I do it for the money; it’s not personal. You? You sure you can live with that kind of shit on your heart? No worries?

Nah, no worries at all.

I’ll fucking put some cigarette burns on her face if that’s what makes you happy. Whatever. You tell me. These are ideas. It’s up to you to tell me what you want.

Fucked-up-wise, just that smile, man.

To help me appreciate the logistical complexity of taking down a guy like Lucero, some ATF agents welcome me into an SUV at a Captain D’s restaurant in Tennessee. We sit listening to static on radios while an agent who goes by Billy waits in a jalopy with no hubcaps at a nearby fast-food joint. Billy’s been buying crack from the bad guy for months now, working the area, getting his name out. The bad guy has already done time for reckless homicide, and now he’s dealing, and now he wants to buy a full-auto machine gun and it’s time to reel him in. Billy is skinny, has the wrinkled skin of a lifetime smoker, and he wears flannel. He has a fake machine gun, wrapped in a T-shirt, stuffed inside a black JanSport backpack. Yesterday, when he last spoke to the bad guy, Billy told him to meet him at the hamburger place at 10 A.M., when, in exchange for some freshly cooked dope, he would sell him the machine gun.

When the deal is done, Billy will say milkshake, like, I’m in the mood for a milkshake, or They got milkshakes in this place? just anything with milkshake in it, at which point a van staked on the east end of the parking lot will swoop in, timed exactly with a van staked at the south end, both of them simultaneously surrounding the jalopy, and the doors will roll open and agents will spill out and the guns will point exactly in and down at the passenger seat, and Billy will roll out of the car, right shoulder over and in, left down, on the ground. And if by some fluke the bad guy slips away—he’s a known runner—a secondary perimeter of agents with a K-9 unit positioned at a nearby cemetery, and another near a school, will move in for the get.

If Billy doesn’t say milkshake but instead says pigeon shit, it means something has gone horribly wrong and Billy might soon be dead, so do whatever everyone needs to do to get him the hell out of there. As a backup plan, Billy will give a hand signal out the window that means roughly the same as pigeon shit.

State and local police have combined forces with the ATF for the takedown—a total of seventeen law-enforcement agents—all of them having showed up at 7 A.M. back at headquarters, where we ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts and sat looking at maps and the agent in charge went over the plan, and then they went out into the parking lot and practiced saving Billy, positioning and repositioning the vans, how they would swoop, timing the swoop, and then calibrating all the angles of all the long guns aimed at the passenger seat and away from Billy.

At Captain D’s the static on the radio continues humming, and now the windows have fogged. On the radio, some guys are reporting results from Words with Friends on their phones. This part is tedious and the reason guys get fat. It’s now ten thirty, and everyone knows the takedown needs to happen before eleven, when the lunch crowd starts coming, just on account of the safety of the American fast-food-eating public. No, the lady working the counter does not know a takedown is being staged in the parking lot, and neither do the kids at the school up the hill.

I just sent him a text, Billy says into the static. Where the hell is the bad guy?

This gets our attention. After all the practicing, everyone wants something to happen.

Welcome to Verizon Wireless. The caller you are trying to reach is not available.

The bad guy is on doper time; 10 A.M. is meaningless, and so is Thursday and so is Friday and so is lunchtime at a burger joint. It doesn’t matter that you have a crew of seventeen officers who got up early for this, kissed their wives, and got the kids off to school, and someone thought to stop at Krispy Kreme.

The bad guy is asleep.

The next day they try again, same crew, same practice, same choreography, and the bad guy shows up, begins to turn into the restaurant parking lot, but then, sensing something, zooms away.

What I’m thinking about is bumping into her car on one of the side streets, the hit man says. It’s the day of the hit, and Lucero is dragging hard on his cigarette in the way of a satisfied man. Walk up, be all nice, blah blah blah. When she rolls the window down, I’m going to grab her by the fucking hair, pull her head out, and swish, swish, swish.

This is their third face-to-face meeting, back once again at the Loaf ’N Jug, and Lucero thinks the hit man’s plan sounds fantastic and is impressed by such a strategic approach. The wrong done unto him shall be righted. Vice-versed.

The hit man asks Lucero what kind of gun he carries, and Lucero tells him it’s a Colt.

You got it on you?

Yeah.

Can you show me the butt? What kind of shape is that in? Oh, that’s in good shape.

That’s my baby right there, says Lucero.

You got a holster. And a knife. So you can go both hands if you need to.

Yeah.

The knife sticks out. The gun don’t.

Yeah.

The hit man is super interested in weapons, Lucero notes. The furthest thing from his mind is the idea that the hit man might be feeding pertinent information to cops sitting in nearby vans, ready to swoop in.

You want me to punch her or burn her or anything else? the hit man asks.

It would put a smile on my face as well.

I could have a cigar in my mouth and give her a couple burns, the hit man offers. That’s up to you, whatever you want. If the slices are good enough, that’s good enough for me. ’Cause I don’t want to be there all day, you know what I mean? When the hit man gets into character like this, he enjoys his work immensely.

If you do have a cigar, do you think you could put one right there? says Lucero, pointing to his forehead.

Like an eye in the center?

Yeah.

Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll cigar her in the head and slit her cheeks. All right. Then I’m going to get to work, dude.

All right. Once I leave this door, it’s on. You’ve got your deal.

So I got the go?

You got the go.

Take it easy, says the hit man. I’ll talk to you soon.

Be careful.

Happy birthday, the hit man mutters.

Next to the Loaf ’N Jug there’s a church. That’s how Lucero usually goes toward home. welcome to praise says the sign outside, and a big white cross pierces a vibrant Colorado sky. Now all this noise, screeching tires, voices booming. Another takedown choreographed, practiced, but this one works. Down on the ground! Down! And tugging, pulling, and Lucero fighting, guys circling him, vans at all angles, doors flung open. Out of nowhere, all this. Lucero squirming, a hissy fit like a 3-year-old fleeing his mother’s grasp. Then a sting so deep, his leg, up to his chest. Fuck! Tased. Fucking tased. What happened? What the fuck just happened?

In the interrogation room at the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office, Lucero explains what happened. There was a hit man! The hit man must have run off.

So, this hit man. Lucero says this hit man made him do things, made him say things he did not mean. That dude was going to kill him. The hit man, Lucero says, is a white-supremacist crazy motherfucker running around, and he must be stopped.

His head was fucking smooth as shit, he says. And then I started remembering shit, you know, from American History X. I wasn’t sure, ’cause he’s wearing like a fist ring, and then I noticed his bracelet. That’s when I was like, fuck, what am I getting myself into?

Uh-huh, the investigator says. Do you know where this dude’s from?

Not that I can recall. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was mostly fucking afraid of his ass and paranoid. Unfuckingbelievably scary. I mean, I watch a lot of the History Channel, Gangland. They’ll fucking kill you on the spot. Son of a bitch, this or that. Don’t fucking hurt me.

Uh-huh, the investigator says. Well, how are we going to find this guy? Do you know where he’s from?